Marc (9 page)

“Yes. I’m going to come just thinking
about you playing with that beautiful pussy of yours.” She heard him moan. “My
balls are full and they’re aching. When I get home I’m going to lean you over a
chair and I’m going to fuck you hard from behind. Then when you’re able to move
again, I’m going to take you into the woods and let my cat take you. Would you
like that? Him to fuck your cat hard out in the woods?”

She cried out her climax when she thought
of him doing just that, his body pressing her down to the ground as he took her
hard. When he roared out his own release, she came again, saying his name over
and over as she pinched her clit. She lay there as both their breathing slowed
back to normal.

“Christ, that was fantastic.” She
laughed at him. “I’ve never had phone sex before. I never dreamed it could be
so…fulfilling.”

“Neither did I. But I have to take a
shower anyway. I’m a mess.” He moaned again and she laughed. “You can’t
possibly think that it’s sexy to be all sticky after sex.”

“I find everything about you sexy,
especially when you’re all sticky after sex. I’d like it better if I was the
one who got you all sticky, but I’ll take care of that when I get home. I’m
planning to make you extremely sated as well.”

He told her again what had happened with
her parents, but he didn’t mention her dad’s fall and the stitches again. She
was grateful for that; she didn’t want to think about him being hurt. She told
him about what his dad had said about her birth parents.

“You had to know that they couldn’t be
your real parents, right?” She told him that she’d figured it out when she’d
shifted and they didn’t know what to do. “I’m sure they didn’t. You think it
was the first time they realized that you were something different than them?”

“I do. Mom was completely freaked out,
and Dad…well, you’ve met him. Nothing much fazes him, but my going from little
girl not wanting to be told she couldn’t go out with a much older boy to a
panther snarling at him made him say a few curse words I’d never heard before,
and pretty sure I’ve not heard since.”

He laughed. “I’m thinking you’re not
much different now than you were then. Maybe a little more…vocal than before,
but just as stubborn.”

She stretched out on the bed as she
thought of Roy. “He’s going to be really mad when he finds that Mom and Dad are
gone, won’t he? He won’t be able to use them against me again.”

“No, he won’t, and we’re hoping he’s
mad. Angry people make ten times more mistakes than people who are calm and
collected.” She heard another voice. “The pilot just announced that we’ll be
landing in a few minutes. I’ll see you in about an hour, okay?”

“I’ll be here.” She heard him speak
again and closed her eyes. “Marc, if after this is over you want me to go away,
I will, but I’ll stay until this man is behind bars.”

“I won’t ever want you to leave me.
Never, Jonny.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve fallen in love with you.”

She lay there for ten minutes, thinking
about what he’d said. He loved her. How was that even possible when he knew so
little about her? Getting up, she went to the shower and decided to take a
bath, something she’d not been able to do in years. Filling the tub, she
thought about him and what he’d done for her and with her. She was stepping
into the tub when she realized something.

“I’m in love with him too.”

Chapter 9

Roy walked around the house again. He couldn’t
believe that they’d left and no one had seen it happen. Well they had, but they
didn’t notice that they were leaving for good. He stepped over the body of one
of the guards and moved to the basement again. Nothing. There wasn’t a damned
thing in the entire house that even looked like anyone lived there. Not one
stick of furniture and not even a box of corn flakes. Everything was gone.

Harris came down the stairs just as Roy was
going back up them. “Have you found out anything? I mean how the fuck did they
get an entire house full of furniture and personal items out of here so
quickly?”

“Don’t know. But you should know that
Anita is on her way here. She’s spitting mad too.” Like he needed that right
now, Roy thought. “Something else. I found some tire marks in the backyard. Looks
heavy when it drove off, probably loaded with the furniture.”

No shit, he thought, and moved to the
empty kitchen again and leaned against the counter. The older Thomas had had an
apparent heart attack just two days ago. The men that had been stationed to
watch the house had gone to get dinner before they’d called it in. Harris told
them to go to the hospital and find out what they could on the couple and to
call him back. It was nearly seven hours later before anyone did. And that
conversation would be burned in his memory forever.

“We can’t find them. We’ve been to five
different hospitals and nobody seems to know nothing about nobody named Thomas
being admitted. He and his missus ain’t nowhere.” Roy had listened to the
entire conversation via speakerphone.

“You mean to tell me that an ambulance
came to the house, took the couple away, and not one hospital has a record of
it?”  He didn’t answer his question right away, but before Roy could tell him
to fucking answer him, the idiot spoke.

“Well, you see…the ambulance that was
here was called City Ambulance. There ain’t no City Ambulance nowhere. We even
checked with the local firehouse. He said he ain’t never heard of it.” The man
gave a little laugh before he continued. “It might be one of those fly-by-night
kinds. You know, here today and gone today.”

Roy stepped out of his house, pulled his
gun, and fired three times into the air. It was either do that or he would have
shot the fucking phone. He had walked back into the house to tell Harris to
stay at the house and wait for him. He’d be there in the morning.

And when they arrived at the house, it
was to find it empty of every possession the couple had owned. Not only that,
but someone had cleaned the place up and even swept the fucking floor. There
were still marks on the carpet from it. He glared at the note again.

“You know that’s what chaps my ass the
most. The fucking bastards had left a note.” He picked it up again, this time
having to straighten it out after he’d crumpled it.

“Thank you for stopping by,” the note
read. “Sorry they’re not here, but we gave the Thomases a better life, one that
guaranteed that they would live a good deal longer. Fondly yours….”

“Who do you suppose left it?” Harris
said. Roy glared at him. “I’m only asking because if we knew that, then we
could find them, and then Jonny.”

“No shit, you fucking genius. You think
that, do you?” Roy walked away before he killed him too, mimicking the man. “
Because
if we knew that, then we could find them, and then Jonny.”

He had to find her. His clients were starting
to get pissed about the deposit they’d given him and no panther. How the fuck
was he supposed to run a business when his star attraction was nowhere to be
found? Damn it, all she had to do was hang around their house for a few days,
steal a few things that they wouldn’t even miss, and then go someplace else.
What the fuck was her problem? And now that he’d “killed” her friend, and
someone had taken her parents, he had nothing to hold over her.

“Boss, do you want me to have one of the
wolves have a look around? They might not be able to find the truck, but they
might be able to find out who helped them.” Roy nodded at Harris.

The wolves were stupid anyway. He
figured that they’d be lucky they could find their own ass, much less find a
couple who, for all intents and purposes, had been cleaned from this house
completely. He watched as they moved past him into the house.

The first one came out almost immediately,
the other three less than a minute behind. He watched them roll in the grass
for several minutes before they moved as far from the house as they could get. Roy
looked at Harris when he stepped out as well.

“What the fuck is that about?”

Harris shrugged. “Well, ask them. Something
either scared the shit out of them or they got a whiff of something.”

“Can’t. Not for an hour at least. They
can’t shift back. Wolves have to stay as they are for at least an hour.” Roy
asked him if he was fucking kidding. “Nope. It’s what makes them nearly
unreliable as a house pet. Once they get into the house and then report back as
a human, they have to stay that way, as a human for an hour. People tend to
miss them when they can’t find them after that long.”

Roy sat down on the deck and put his
head on his hands. This was a fucking nightmare. He had shifters, about a dozen
of them, that couldn’t be a panther for some dumb fucking reason, wolves that
had to be a wolf for an hour, and a panther that fucking wasn’t cooperating.
And now this house. He looked over the yard and started to laugh when he
noticed that there wasn’t even a bit of lawn furniture. He looked up when Anita
walked out to where he was.

“Where the hell is the furniture?” Roy
started laughing. Tears were streaming down his face, and every time he looked
at the wolves at the back of the property with their tails between their legs,
he would laugh more. Finally, when he thought he could control himself, he told
her what had happened. She wasn’t any happier about it than he was.

~~~

Marc was in his office looking over the
file he’d been looking at for the past ten minutes without seeing it when
someone knocked. He looked up to see Dylan and Jack walk in. Jack had a laptop
in her hand, and Dylan wore a grin.

“What the hell is up with you two? And I
thought you weren’t going to be back here for a few more weeks.” Jack nodded
and came around to his side of the desk.

“I’ve been looking up some information
that Jacob gave me. It’s about Jonny.” She laughed when another knock sounded
at his door. “That would be her now.”

Marc smiled at Jonny as she walked in. She
blushed when he wiggled his brows at her, and he nearly burst out laughing when
Dylan asked her to have a seat. She moved as far from him as she could.

“What’s the matter, honey, don’t you
trust me?” She snorted at Dylan. “Ah, that’s no way to treat the man who saved
your family’s treasures.”

“Did he tell you what he did?” Jonny
said. He shook his head at her and looked at his brother. “He had someone go
into my parents’ home and pack everything up. Every piece of furniture they had
and their safe in the basement. It was delivered today and put into storage for
them. He told me he had the place cleaned too. And fucking marked.”

Dylan laughed as he tried to defend
himself. “I knew that they’d try to find out who helped them, and I didn’t know
how much of Marc and I we’d left behind. Would you have felt better if they
could have figured out that a different panther had helped them escape?”

Marc started to tell his brother not to
piss Jonny off, that she had a short fuse, but decided he was on his own. He
watched them out of the corner of his eye while Jack pulled up something from a
thumb drive.

“You don’t think that someone is going
to tell them who did it?” Jonny demanded. Dylan shook his head. “And why the
fuck is that?”

“Because their neighbors helped me move
everything out.” Jonny’s mouth closed and she looked at him before turning back
to Dylan as he continued. “I had gone over to their house as soon as Marc left.
I, as you know, was going back to get my wife, but decided to help your parents
out. I liked them.”

“I do too. But that doesn’t negate the
fact that you might have gotten caught there. How do you think my mom and dad
would have felt if you’d gotten hurt moving their stuff out if Roy caught you
there?”

“I told the two goons to not say
anything about the move until we were finished. Besides, they were very helpful
in carrying the larger pieces. And when the neighbors saw what was going on,
they helped too. When I couldn’t get a couple of the larger pieces on the
truck, Mr. Sanders let me store it in his garage. And Mrs. Granger was nice
enough to take all the food to the local pantry. She even cleaned the place up
for us. After everyone was gone, I went back in and….” He grinned at him. “I
made sure that nothing but another panther would be able to enter the place and
try to scent us out. They’ll be useless as a hunter as soon as they get a whiff
of the calling card I left behind.”

“I don’t understand,” Jonny said, and looked
at him as he shook his head. “You aren’t going to tell me?”

“I don’t think you want to know. Suffice
it to say that a panther’s urine is very toxic to other animals. That’s why it’s
so hard to track us even in the wild.”

“You pissed in the house?” She stood up
and looked down at Dylan. “You pissed in my parents’ house?” He nodded.

Jonny sat down. She looked pole axed, but
Marc didn’t blame her. She knew so little about what she was and what she could
do that he wanted to take her aside and tell her everything. His mom had given
her a book about panther legend, but she’d barely scratched the surface since
this had been going on.

“I found something.” Marc looked up at
Jack, completely forgetting that she had said she had something to tell him.
“I’m not going to tell you where I got this information, and I won’t share it
with just anyone, but you two, I trust you.”

Marc thanked her and looked at the
charts on her computer. “What is it I’m looking at? And why do I care?”

“You should care because it’s a list of
every panther ever born. And will be born.” He looked at her sharply. “You can’t
ask. But I can tell you what Dylan and I have found out about our Jonny here.”

“Me? But your dad, he told me who my
biological parents are. He said my father is dead and about my mother, he had
no idea. And no, before you ask, I haven’t asked Mom and Dad how they managed
to end up with me.”

“They ended up with you because someone
left you on their doorstep, quite literally.” While Jack pointed to the entry,
Jonny came to sit on his lap. “According to this entry, you were left by
someone by the name of ‘Bob.’ There are no other references to him other than
that. But you should know that both your parents are alive. Your mom is in a
zoo and is shackled so she can’t shift, and your father….”

“My father what?” Jack sat down and
glanced at Dylan, who nodded at her to continue. Marc pulled Jonny closer to
him, knowing that she was going to be upset by whatever Jack told her.

“Your father is her keeper. He works at
the zoo and specializes in panthers. Your mother is one of his animals. The
rest of the information says that he keeps her like that so that she can’t harm
anyone again. She was sentenced to where she is by the council after the trial.
The band on her ankle is magical, but no one but your father can see it. She’s
bound there until she dies. And when she does, your father has asked to die
with her. It’s the pact they made with the council.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?” Jonny sat
up and looked at Jack and Dylan. “I don’t know how you got this information,
and I don’t really care, but I want to know the rest.”

Dylan cleared his throat. “Your mother
was pregnant with you when she decided that she would rob a bank. The bank had
been hit the week before and your mother decided that it would be a good time
to hit it again. She was heard to say that no one would think that it would be
hit so soon and they’d be more relaxed. She was wrong. As soon as they entered,
it went from bad to worse in seconds. They killed three people, including the
bank manager and a child. They never left the building with any money.”

“You said ‘they.’ Who was with her? I’m
assuming it wasn’t my father.” Dylan shook his head. “Then who, damn it. Stop
fucking beating around the bush and tell me.”

“It was Anita Kidd’s older brother,
Samuel Kidd. According to witnesses, he knew that the game was over. He was
reported begging her to stop, and when she didn’t, he started letting the
hostages go without her knowing. When she eventually found out, she shot him in
the head and killed him.”

“She sold me out to Roy because my
mother had her brother killed.” Marc could feel her shock and pulled her to him
again, but she pulled away and started pacing the room. “Why didn’t they kill
her, my mother, I mean? Because of me, right?”

“Yes, that and the fact that they wanted
her to suffer. She hated children, and the council decided that her best course
of punishment was to have her around them all the time. Your father stayed with
her because she is his mate. He can’t leave her no matter what she tried to do
to you.”